German Trainee Programme (GTP): Mathematician, Physicist or similar

German Trainee Programme (GTP): Mathematician, Physicist or similar

Start your mission with DLR

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is the national aeronautics and space research centre and the space agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. Here, 8000 employees work together on a unique variety of topics in the fields of aeronautics, space, energy, transport, security and digitalisation. Their missions range from basic research to the development of innovative applications and products for tomorrow. Cutting-edge research requires excellent
minds – particularly more females – at all levels, who fully achieve their potential in an inspiring environment. Launch your mission with us.

For our German Trainee Programme (GTP) in cooperation with ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, we wish to recruit a qualified

Have you (almost) completed your degree studies? Are you inspired by space exploration and keen to pursue a career in this exciting field? If so, perhaps you should take a closer look at the German Trainee Programme. Organised by DLR, it offers you the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with experts from the 22 member states of ESA – keeping your finger on the pulse of Europe‘s space programmes. Over a period up to 24 months, you will actively contribute to the latest research and/or technology projects. This is complemented by a generous scholarship. What better way to launch your career in international space business? The next GTP commences on 1st February2019.

You will join the Sensor Performance, Products and Algorithms section (EOP-GMQ), a team of 20 experts in Remote Sensing with different sensors. You will work under the direct supervision of the Sentinel-1 Data Quality Manager, and will liaise with a distributed team of experts located in different ESA sites, research labs and industry working in Synthetic Aperture Radar in general and improvement of platform attitude knowledge in particular.

Tasks:

Sentinel-1 (S-1) is Synthetic Aperture Radar working at C-band. It is a game changer in the EO SAR community thanks to the open and free data policy, the systematic processing scenario and the quality of the data.

The S-1 product family is composed of Level 1 and Level 2 products. The S-1 Level 1 products are the classical SAR images providing the backscattered signal. The L2 products are derived from the L1 and are converting the SAR signal into geophysical variables. The S-1 L2 products provide up to three ocean field related variables related to the wind, the swell and the currents.

The current retrieval is based on the so-called Doppler oceanography that might be the focus of other potential ESA missions like SKIM (Earth Explorer 9 candidate). The currents retrieval from S-1 is not possible today due to the limited knowledge of the platform attitude. It has been demonstrated that attitude restitution on-ground outperforms the attitude determination performed by the on-board Attitude, Orbit and Control System (AOCS). However, the current ground restitution process doesn’t allow capturing all the platform variations as measured by the SAR. Therefore, the fine tuning of the ground-restitution requires to optimize different parameters related to the gyroscopes and star-tracker with a long and iterative process.

The purpose of the work is to develop a process based on machine learning to optimise the ground attitude restitution process with the final goal of enabling the currents retrieval from SAR.

Your qualifications:

strong expertise in mathematics and physics

strong competence in machine learning based on neural networks on a practical point of view

familiarity with the physics of sensor like star tracker or gyroscopes is a plus

German citizenship is absolutely necessary

applicants should have just completed (conclusion not older than two years) or be in their final year of a university course at Master’s level in a technical or scientific discipline

candidates must be fluent in English or French, the official languages of the Agency

Your start:

We look forward to your e-mail application in English, citing GTP-2019-EOP-GMQ to GTP@dlr.de.

Closing date for this position is 6th September 2018. The interviews are tentatively scheduled for week 45/2018. Please visit the German Trainee Programme page for details of our application procedures. Your application should consist of a motivation letter and your CV only (CV exclusively in Europass format). Unfortunately we cannot consider further documents. Disabled applicants with equivalent qualifications will be given preferential treatment. If you have any initial questions, please feel free to contact Ms. Larissa Seidlez: larissa.seidlez@dlr.de.